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Pope Francis’s first liturgical scandal occurred in October 2019 during the so-called Synod on the Amazon when statues of an idol representing the Mother Earth goddess, or Pachamama, were venerated in St. Peter’s Basilica.

During the ceremonies there was a dancing procession of Pachamama where people prostrated themselves before the two wooden statues that represented naked and pregnant women and a statue of a male phallic figure reclining on his back. The event was meant to symbolize “the cry of the Amazonian land and native peoples.”

Francis later apologized for the incident, but the damage was done.

These disquieting events are rooted in some provocative church history. In 2018, the publication Catholic Philly.com commented on the Catholic Charismatic movement,

“Some traditional Catholics might be turned off by the highly emotional exuberance of a Charismatic meeting, which can demonstrate such gifts of the Holy Spirit as prophecy, faith healing and speaking in tongues. Advocates believe this is simply the workings of the Holy Spirit.”

The Holy Spirit has been “blamed” for a number of innovations in the Catholic Church — from the creation of Eucharistic Ministers, Communion-in-hand, liturgical dancers, Argentine puppet Masses, altar girls, to the movement for women priests and deacons.

Advertisements for the 2019 Philadelphia Catholic Charismatic Renewal Conference had the look of an old time southern revival. The ad was printed in big bold letters in the style of Big Tent evangelism.

Passages from Scripture were arranged around information surrounding the event:

A beautiful woman showing off her million-dollar suntan and bright shiny dental veneers was listed as the guest speaker. She wasn’t just ‘anybody’ but someone who was “baptized in the Holy Spirit in 1957” (as if her first Baptism wasn’t enough). The woman, so the ad stated, “is committed to making Jesus known to the Nations by the preaching of the Gospel in the Power of the Holy Spirit.”

As Karl Keating, in a 2017 article on the Catholic charismatic movement, wrote in ‘Catholic Answers’:

“The Catholic variant of charismaticism dates from 1967. It began at Duquesne University, spread to Notre Dame, and then went viral, as the current saying has it. A Belgian cardinal, Leo Suenens, was an early patron. Pope Paul VI, while a charismatic event was in progress in Rome, said some positive things about the movement’s emphasis on “communion of souls” and its promotion of prayer. Later, John Paul II encouraged Catholic charismatics to defend the Christian notion of social life against inroads by secularism.”

“The popes,” Keating continues, “never endorsed the notion of a “Baptism in the Spirit,” nor did they speak in favor of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues.”

As many traditional Christians know, speaking in tongues was a singular event at Pentecost. It had everything to do with ‘gifting’ the early apostles and disciples with a knowledge of foreign languages so they could go out into the world, and had nothing to do with rolling around on the floor in a fever pitch. In fact, the contemporary concept of “speaking in tongues” (shaking your body with upraised hands) was virtually unknown throughout most of Christianity until 1830. That’s when a certain excitable Scottish Presbyterian minister, Edward Irving, manufactured its appearance “through his enthusiastic preaching.”

Keating concludes: “After that, speaking in tongues died down until the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of the modern Pentecostal movement. There were no Catholic examples of it until two-thirds of a century later.”

Yet this didn’t stop a Redemptorist brother, Brother Pancratius Boudreau (Joseph Andrew Boudreau), from starting the Catholic Charismatic Movement in the late 1960s.

After Vatican II, many Catholics in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia were hooting and hollering like Big Tent evangelicals. The era of ‘quietly saying the rosary’ was seen as retrograde and Protestant-unfriendly. Although creeping Pentecostalism existed in mostly isolated parishes with special Masses, elements of the Charismatic movement began to seep into heretofore dignified parishes.

That’s when one spotted people at Mass praying the Lord’ Prayer in the Orans fashion, while others took to holding hands with fellow parishioners. Some lay people — convinced that they had special spiritual gifts — would lay their hands on the heads of fellow parishioners.

Call it a full-fledged revival along the lines of Jim and Tammy Bakker.

On the heels of the charismatic movement came the Cursillo movement, founded in Spain in 1944 as a way to bring Spanish men back to the Church.

The Cursillo retreat was really the Catholic version of EST (Erhard Seminars Training, a quasi religious therapy program founded in 1971 by Werner Erhard). The Cursillo 3-day retreat emphasized non-stop group activity with little or no solitude. Criticisms of the Cursillo movement by traditionalists pointed to “in group secrets” and instructions. Some former Cursillo devotees have even compared it to a cult, the Catholic version of Freemasonry.

The two founders of Cursillo, Eduardo Bonnin and Bishop Juan Hervas, saw their movement transported to the United States in 1957, although Cursillo hit its stride in the states in the 1970s in conjunction with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. The two movements might be said to have produced a “new” type of Catholicism: the “Jesus Saves” hand clapping “let’s get emotional” school, and the so called Masonic “secret society” of Cursillo, which started out as a movement exclusively for men but which, falling victim to secular culture and the demands of feminists, went co-ed.

Moving forward, the question of female deacons will be discussed at the upcoming Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2024. (Cardinal George Pell has called the Synod on Synodalty a “toxic nightmare couched in a neo-Marxist message.” )

While many observers believe that the idea of a female deaconate in the Church will be approved, it is doubtful whether the new office, once established, will follow the tradition of so-called women deacons in the early Eastern Church, who had no liturgical function whatsoever but were primarily assigned on an ad hoc basis to care for women catechuems about to be baptized.

Yet as the Catholic Church becomes increasingly woke and reflective of the modern age, Catholic feminists and their male counterparts won’t be happy with a Baptism-oriented only female Deaconate, but will insist that female deacons, in a break with tradition, get to do everything that their male counterparts do: assist priests and bishops at Mass, baptize, proclaim the Gospel and assist at the altar.

The Roman Church’s obsessive desire to update its liturgy, doctrines and beliefs while promoting climate, gender and transgender ideology — as if the latter were necessary for salvation — goes against the teachings of Saint Paul, who said that the Church must be a countercultural force.

The Church has to be a force against the modernism of this world, and it should not, as many have said, marry the spirit of the age. If there’s no difference between the world and the Church, this would be a mark that the Church has lost its spiritual dimension.

Of course, the radical handwriting was on the wall when Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected to the papacy in 2013.

At his first address to the crowds in St. Peter’s Square as Francis I, he had refused to wear the papal mozzetta. This seemingly small break with tradition was the first red flag signaling that the new pope was a liturgical modernist.

Years later, in January 2021, Pope Francis called for open borders when he wrote that nations had an obligation “to welcome, promote, protect, and integrate those who come in search of better lives for themselves and their families.”

What is this, if not a call for a full-scale Pachamama migrant invasion?